Washing and soaking rice helps reduce harmful lead and cadmium to safe levels, but it doesn’t cut down arsenic enough to make it safe from cancer risk.

Washing rice before cooking and using lots of water (like boiling it like pasta) removes more harmful metals like arsenic and lead than just cooking it in a small amount of water — so rinsed cooking is better at making rice safer to eat.

Washing your rice and wheat with three times as much water as grain before cooking can wash away some harmful arsenic, which might lower your chance of getting cancer if you eat these foods every day.

Soaking your rice for longer—like 12 hours instead of just 1—can wash out more of the bad stuff like arsenic and lead, making your rice safer to eat.

If you soak your rice in water overnight and then throw out that water before cooking, you’ll end up with rice that has less of the harmful arsenic your body can absorb.

If you eat a lot of rice and wheat and cook with water that has arsenic in it, computer models suggest you might be over 80 times more likely to get cancer than the average person in the U.S.—but this is just a prediction, not something scientists have actually seen happen yet.